Then they turned cold.
Then they turned threatening.
Then, in every folder, they simply stopped.
No resignation letter.
No forwarding address.
Just silence, mid-conversation, as though each woman had fallen off the edge of the world.
Claire photographed every page with her phone.
Her hands moved faster than her fear could catch up to.
She photographed the folder labeled Daniela last.
It was the thickest one.
The final message in Daniela’s folder read only: I told you I would go to a lawyer.
Below it, in Nathan’s handwriting, someone had written a single word in the margin.
Handled.
Claire stared at that word for a long time.
Handled.
Not resolved.
Not settled.
Handled, the way you handle a problem, the way you handle something that resists you.
She heard a car door close outside.
Her whole body went still.
She looked through the window and saw an unfamiliar sedan parked at the curb.
Not Nathan’s car.
A man in a gray suit got out and walked toward the front entrance with a key of his own.
Claire recognized him immediately.
Bradley Simmons.
Head of HR at Hawthorne Global.
The man whose name she had circled at six that morning.
She had only seconds.
She closed the cabinet, locked it, closed the office door, and ducked into the guest bathroom down the hall just as she heard the front door open.
Bradley’s voice carried up the stairwell.
He was on the phone.
“I told him not to bring her here,” he was saying.
“This isn’t the kind of thing you handle in your own house.”
A pause.
“No, I haven’t seen her yet. I’m checking the office.”
Claire’s blood went cold.
He was talking about her.
Bradley continued up the stairs.
She heard him try the study door.
It opened easily, because she hadn’t had time to reset anything beyond what was necessary.
“The cabinet’s locked,” he said into the phone. “Good. She wouldn’t have known the second code.”
Claire pressed herself against the bathroom wall, barely breathing.
“I’ll tell him to change the office lock today,” Bradley continued. “And Nathan needs to stay away from that girl until this blows over. I don’t care if she’s carrying his kid. Optics.”
There was a long pause.
“No. If she talks to a lawyer, we handle it the way we handled Daniela.”
Claire’s stomach lurched violently.
The way we handled Daniela.
Not Nathan.
We.
Bradley wasn’t just complicit after the fact.
He was part of the machine from the beginning.
She stayed frozen in that bathroom for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only ten minutes.
Eventually she heard his footsteps recede down the stairs, the front door open and close, and the sedan pull away outside.
She waited five more minutes before she moved.
Then she left the way she’d come, careful not to touch anything she hadn’t already touched, and drove straight back to the hotel with her hands trembling on the wheel the entire way.
Marisol was awake when she returned.
She took one look at Claire’s face and stood up immediately.
“What happened?”
“I found the files.”
“And?”
“There were six names.”
Marisol’s face went pale.
“Six?”
“Including Daniela.”
Marisol sat down heavily on the bed.
“I heard Bradley Simmons on the phone,” Claire continued.
“Who?”
“The head of HR.”
“What did he say?”
Claire hesitated, unsure how much to say to a woman who was already carrying enough fear for both of them.
But Marisol deserved the truth.
